The Balanced Brain Test is not exactly new, these kinds of tests have been around in one form or another for years. We all like the idea that we can spend forty-five seconds and discover if our brain is balanced by the choices that we make.

The Balanced Brain Test on Friday's Law has a list of words and phrases-critical, nurturing, concise and the like. You pick fifteen of these words and hit the submit button to see how balanced your brain is at the moment you took the test.

My brain is balanced, thank you very much-though it might be argued that this proves the balanced brain test is imperfect. The score for the balanced brain test falls into three broad areas-Frontal Lobe, Upper Cerebral Cortex, and Temporal Lobe. I scored two 5s and a 7, though this appears to be a bit on the low side, it falls withing the normal range.

The point of this balanced brain silliness is to become normal, or to stay normal if your there already. Well, who wants to be normal? We all want to be above average like the kids in Lake Wobegon-though I'm sure they all have perfectly balanced brains.

Also on the website are Friday's Laws, which might also be called The Bleeding Obvious:

1.Life is difficult.
2.Perception is reality.
3.Change is the toughest thing a human being can do.
4.You can never change another human being; you can only change yourself. Once you change, they change, but you cannot change them.
5.I am responsible for everything I do and say. I am not responsible for your response.
6.The future and the past are seldom as good or as bad as we anticipate or remember.
7.Nobody has a squeaky-clean psyche.
8.The only thing that lasts forever is...Now.

I was a huge fan of Pinky and The Brain-though it is clear that these two lab mice did not have very balanced brains at all.

In what seems a bit of a shocker to me, Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse will air on the much hated Fox Network. Much hated because they butchered the airing of Joss Whedon's Firefly by showing it out of order, only airing a handful of episodes, and generally sabotaging Firefly before it had a chance to build any kind of following. Sci fi shows have a history of not being strong right out of the gate. Star Trek didn't really take off until it had been canceled for several years.

The first season of Survivor was an instant classic of silliness, nudity, loyalty, betrayal, and just plain fun. During that first season, host Jeff Probst went on the CBS Early Show and announced that the person who won Survivor was the last person you would have thought it would be. It became a ritual not only to watch the show, but to watch the Voted Off Contestant the next morning on the CBS Early Show. We were totally addicted to Survivor. When Richard Hatch won it was both shocking and expected. You never knew how the votes were going to go.

But that was the first season-after that it was all about the Alliance. It was not uncommon for there to be several different votes at a Tribal Counsel on the first season, where the previously stupidest player on Survivor voting by Alphabetical Order. But after Season One it was rare to see anyone get less than a unanimous vote in Tribal Counsel. This ganging up strategy has really ruined the game-but it seems that this is what the creators of Survivor want.

Then there is the issue in recent seasons of major injuries-what would happen to The Price is Right if one of every ten people walking on stage suffered a serious injure and had to be rushed off to Hospital? Survivor is a little too dangerous for 'just a game.'

Survivor Microenesia was the best season in a long time, as there were all these blind side votes and Erik-The Biggest Idiot in Survivor History giving up his immunity. But there were also injuries and potential for a lot more injury due to the nature of the group challenges which encourage people to hurt each other or themselves. There was also the issue for me of the Fans vs Favorites bit-whose Favorites exactly were these people?

I have watched at least part of every season of Survivor-none have been as good as the first season and it is unlikely that any ever will be. Survivor doesn't need to be physically dangerous, it is hard enough already. No shelter, seldom enough food, you can't trust anyone-is being bruised and battered really necessary?

So maybe it is time for Survivor to go the way of all the other Reality Shows it spawned. Parvati winning didn't help any, but then, I didn't really care at all which the finial four won.

"Happily," Bryson writes, "we were indestructible. We didn't need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver."

Listening to Bill Bryson as he reads, with some relish, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, one is struck by the idea that he must have sent off for one of those Hypnosis Kits he found in the back of comic books in the 1950s. His voice is soothing and plesant but seems to be hiding something.

It's a slightly confusing account of what it was like being a rich kid in Iowa in the 1950s. There is a jumble of information here, from the world's most boring toy-electric football, to the near end of the world events of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. So it is kind of a paradox, much like the 1950s themselves.

It is hard not to be jealous of Bill Bryson anyway-he has lead the kind of life many of us grew up dreaming about. Idyllic childhood aside, he has been a successful writer and globe trotter and seems to always be in the mist of some grand adventure. What a twit.

Anyway-The Thunderbolt Kid has innumerable and annoying references to the afore mentioned hero-one Billy Bryson as a child. I used to have globe dominating fantasies myself, but I was more of the Walter Mittiy model where I would re-create great history events with myself cast as the hero. Bill Bryson's Lighting Bolt Kid is simply an average child who hates anyone older and stronger than he is and vaporizes them with glee. This particular bit of business I could have done without. But the bits about junk food, toys, tv shows, and a wanton obsession with sex are all unsettlingly familiar and strike a note of fond remembrance. Though I was a good ten years later on arrival than Bill.

Like A Christmas Story, there is a kind wonderland feeling to these memories of a world long gone and all but forgotten. But Bill Bryson spends a little too much time on the wonders of Atomic Weapons for it to be as wholesome as a Christmas Story-and I don't recall our hero lusting for anything except his Red Ryder B B Gun. But there is still that kind of feel about it. That It would have nice to be a kid then, feel. Though of course, The Wonder Years was about my own time.

Bill Bryson paints the portrait of The Good Old Days-as all older people do-with mile high snow drifts and the trip to school uphill both ways-but he does so with tongue firmly in cheek. Bill can't help, from time to time, dropping in bits of data such as how many thousands of farms there are in Iowa today versus how many thousands of farms there where in Iowa when he was a child. These little statical oddities tend to push you out of the narrative, such as it is, and make you wonder if he is making the figures up, as he does about people's ages-everyone seemed to be about six thousand years old.

But it is a fun book and there were many laugh out loud moments.

Speed Racer is easily the most boring action film since Matrix Revolutions. The racing, with it's cartoon backgrounds, had all the realism of racing in front of a cartoon background. All of the scenes with the cartoon backgrounds were slightly out of phase with the live action sequences so that it never looked right-but then, maybe this not quite right look is what they were going for.

I don't know who the kid playing Speed Racer was, but he was a perfect blend of cartoon Speed Racer and Elvis Presley. It was good to see John Goodman and Susan Sarandon was fun. It was clear that they wanted Tim Curry to play the over the top villain, but Tim must have been busy with Spamalot. It was also good to see Mathew Fox off the LOST Island. Paulie Litt's Spritle was the most annoying bit of this very annoying movie.

The story, such as it was, made even less sense than most of the real Speed Racer story lines. But clearly this was never meant to be a plot driven movie, though it is unclear what exactly it was meant to be. The racing sequences were an odd combination of James Caan's Rollerball and an over sized Hot Wheels set. Its impossible to describe how totally and complete fake the racing looked. There are all these 'high speed' jumps and turns and then they show a shot of Speed sitting in a perfectly still car like an actor taking it easy on a motionless green screen.

There was also the odd fact that most of the shots of the Mark 5 had a large 6 on the side of the car-until late in the film when the 'new' car is rolled out-and we get a tight shot of the 6 that has been seen all through the film already. Among the countless annoyovision treats are blindly bright walls, clothes, floors, skies, and well, everything else. At home with the Racer family we often see the Mark 5 setting in the living room, without anyone giving it a second look.

Get some of the old cartoons and watch them-those are a lot more realistic and the characters are more fully developed.

From time to time I run across a book that tells the tale of a Company That Has Lost Its Way. Where's The Sausage is just such a book. It is about building brands based on what the company actually makes-as opposed to the emotions that it invokes. So that a Portrait Studio might think about the quality of it's Photography and not We're Making Memories. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of all the advice you find in most marketing books. Here the product is a mythical sausage, which is not as good as it once was, but can rise from the ashes with a bit of help.

There is something very appealing about the idea of getting back to core values, but even that sounds too Marketish for Where's The Sausage. It's a fun read-the story of a man thrust into the Marketing dept to promoting a sausage pizza he doesn't believe in or even like. On the way he discovers that the company's real strength is in- wait for it- sausages. He then has to find someone to support his plan to refocus on sausage and get the money to promote his vision of Real Organic Sausages. There are a number of companies in England, where the book is set, which do in fact brag about the wholesome goodness of their fine meat products.

But for me, the book really hits home in that I work for a Big Heartless Corporation which is slowly spinning around the drain. We don't sell sausages, we sell photos, and it is a tougher business than it used to be when my company was King of The World lo these many years ago. Like the company in the book, our bosses want to do everything but support their core business. Which is a bit depressing for those of us on the front lines.

The hero of Where's The Sausage owes his ultimate success to having made friends with a Member of The Board of Directors of his Sausage Company-it is pretty unlikely that I will be making friends in Upper Management any time soon. Which is one of the bits of advice in Where's The Sausage, without help from Top Management you really can't expect to change anything.

Which is a bit of downer, as it narrows the readership of the book a bit. If your a front line check-out clerk at Wal-Mart the odds of your being buddies with one of the Waltons is pretty damned slim-so even if you have a dead brilliant idea-who will bother to listen to you?

But maybe there is still hope for smaller outfits with a few less layers of dead weight management to go through. Reading Never Mind The Sizzle...Where's The Sausage is fun and hopeful, but ultimately depressing. I can't see any real world application of these brilliant ideas, unless you happen to be buddies with the Chairman of the Board-in which case you are likely part of the problem and not part of the solution anyway.

In the good old days of film photography, you had to spin a lot of dials, adjust a lot settings, make sure you had the right speed film for the subject, and so on and so forth. A nice modern digital camera set to Auto will do all the work for you and capture near perfect images every time.

But just using a digital camera to take pictures is missing a great deal of the fun. Dropping those images into Photoshop and applying a filter or two is much more interesting.

One of my favorite magazines is called After Capture, from the makers of Rangerfinder. The very first issue was so amazing that every issue after that has been a bit of disappointment, but they are still fun to read and look at. One of the topics covered in that first issue was HDRI-Hugh Dynamic Range Images. Go find a dimly lite room with an outside window flooding in some light-like my junk room for instance. You take about 16 exposures of this room, using a tripod of course, and bracketing the images a couple of stops from underexposed to over exposed.

Once you have this series of images you open up Photoshop and use the Merge to HDR command under the Automate tab under the File tab. Give it a couple of minutes, if you have an older machine like mine, and you get an images where there is even exposure over the entire image. This means the trees outside the window are as clear as the odds and ends on the bookshelf. Once you have this HDR image you then run it through the Tone Mapping Plug-In and set to work adjusting the shadows and highlights until you like the way it looks.

Dan Burkholder's work was featured in After Capture and has been in Rangerfinder as well. To say that his work looks a bit better than my first attempt is an understandment. His HDR images are simply amazing. In the article he says that like uses FDRTools software for many of his images-this software helps with ghosting in your HDRIs.

There are a number books on the topic of HDRI and not all of them are about creating art. Just using this technique on a tough subject and getting an even exposure makes it worth learning. It is also a good way to process Infrared Digital Images. Use a 16-bit IR image with the Tone Mapping Plug-in and you'll get a good range of shades. Then you can process it in Photoshop to remove the color and adjust the levels.

Flickr also has a nice selection of examples of HDRIs.

Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page.
Wikipedia

In a perfect world your blog would get backlinks on it's own merit. Some other blogger reads what you have to say and points a link your way-they may like what you have to say or hate what you have to say-a backlinkis backlink. I try to point to two other blogs when I write a post in a passive attempt at getting reciprocal links. Sometimes I get a backlink, sometimes not.

The trouble with this method of getting backlinks is that you need to some way to check backlinks. Technorati has always been a favorite place to check back links-it tells me I have 127 blog reactions. Which is cool, but when I look at Web Tools Back Link Checker it tells me I have 1,054 backlinks. I'll be honest and say I have no idea what this means.

But I do know you can build links and you can exchange links with other bloggers. Blogcatalog is a good place to join and find advice on link building and find link exchanges as well. But I found that I quickly grew tired of this kind of reciprocal linking-you join a join and add your link and then you link to everyone else and check back from time to time to see who else you need to link to. It takes a bit of time, but then, all the backlink methods tend to take a bit of time.

Entrecard-the best loved/most hated blog promotion tool-has generated a lot of link love for me and I have done next to nothing to get these backlinks. I put my Entrecard Widget at the top of the page and accept anyone that wants to advertise there. There are a number of lists on Entrecard blogs about their favorite blogs, easy card drop blogs, highest card dropper blogs and so on. My blog shows up on one or another list from time to time.

Blog comments have turned into a pretty good backlink tool. There are two No Follow search engines-that I know of-and likely more will be showing up. Do Follo was the first one that I found and I use it from time to time. BacklinkSpot is the other U Comment/I Follow type of search engine. Both seem a bit limited on content at the moment-you will get the same blogs for many searches. Leaving comments is easy link building, so I can't complain too much.

But I am pretty lazy on the link exchange front and the commenting on Do Follow blogs front. Nor do I buy backlinks, though I have thought about it. Google doesn't seem to like for you to buy links, they want them to come naturally. Which brings me to my own method of search engine ranking, write about trendy things and try to catch the occasional buzz wave. Once you have a good spot on Google-getting into the top ten is possible on many topics simply by pounding the keywords-then people will read you and point links at you.

So why do you need to find backlinks? It's one more way to keep score and improve your search engine rank. The better your search engine ranking. the more people will stop by your blog. Whether you are doing a bit of search engine marketing, or just want more readers, seo helps. The text link is easy enough to do on your own-link to another blog using their name or their blogs name, or if they are all about making money online, link to them with that text link. Don't just say look here, unless you don't want the topic of the blog link to reflect your own blog. But since it about getting cheap links, you should be linking for keywords.

Some experts on seo ranking think one way links are better than link exchanges. That's more of a real measure of link popularity-if they link to you without your having to ask for it, either directly or indirectly. The more backlinks you have the better seems to be a common thought, but not all links are created equal. Links from high Pagerank blogs are better than links from zero pagerank blogs. But I don't worry too much about it. If a blog with a zero pagerank hangs around long enough their Pagerank will likely grow. And once it does, there is your backlink waiting to be noticed again.

Nickoo Shore just advises creating your own Link Love Do Follow list. RSS Pieces advises joining as many directories as you can-a good idea.

Did I Say Thousand Island is a movie about being a waitress made by a waitress-which looks like a movie made by a waitress. As far as indie films go, I guess this is about par for the course.

I heard about this film on NPR and thought, what the heck, I love Stupid Customer Stories. And there are a lot of Stupid Customer Stories here, but not as many as I had thought there would be. This is a work of fiction-I was expecting something more along the lines of the great Nickel and Dimed. But this is not really a movie about being a waitress-its a sort of a Harlequin Romance set in a restaurant in the Rockies.

The biggest shock in Did I Say Thousand Island is the fact that all waitresses and waiters are independently wealthy. I had no idea that being a waitress afforded owning a hundred acre horse ranch with a custom log cabin on it. The main waitress has the horse ranch-just for fun so far as I can tell-she is a waitress and loves it. Another waitperson owns a fancy house in a good neighborhood. All the waitresses and waiters spend a lot of time skiing, fishing, and partying. Clearly Guidance Councilors need to stop wasting time advising people to become doctors and architects-being a waitress is where the real money is.

The story, such as it is, involves a waitress who loves being a waitress, falls in love with a big blond from Sweden-or someplace like Sweden-and they live happily ever after. Before our heroes ride off into the sunset there is a lot of whining about how stupid people are. It's impossible to work with the public in any form at all and not realize that people are stupid.

Every industry has its own set of Stupid Customer Stories from people running in the door at closing time to customers being locked in the store while trying on twenty different outfits to people ordering food that isn't on the menu. So Did I Say Thousand Island has a lot of standard stupid customer comments, but these we-would-have-a-good-restaurant-if-it-weren't-for-all-these-damned-customers comments are meant to be comic relief-along with a number comments about farting and a few jokes about sex.

The movie itself had very low production values and very bad acting, as is standard in indie films. You get used to perfect cuts, perfect sound, perfect transitions, and perfect everything else that goes into making a movie. Even the direct to DVD turkeys usually look like a movie. Did I Say Thousand Island looks like a collection of home movies slapped together.

There are a few funny bits and they try a couple of serious items. The serious stuff doesn't fly very well as it doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the fluff the movie is made of. It isn't really a Cinderella story, since in this case, Cinderella is rich and owns her own castle. The women are all strong, the men are all gay or dimwitted, and the children are cute and quickly handed off to someone else.

Maybe if it were re-written fifteen or twenty times and made by a Big Studio it would be better. But the point here is not really whether it is a great film or not, but that someone besides a Big Studio made it.

As far as looking into the secret world of restaurants goes, I liked Kitchen Confidential better, but then, I am a man.

This is the advice is given by Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the story of how The Western Diet replaced real food with fake food and condemned all of us to disease and general poor health. This might have been subtitled the book the Food Industry Doesn't Want You To Read. As the villain in the story is processed foods of all kinds, from flour to Twinkies-they are all killing us. The farther we move from the lifestyle of the Hunters/Gathers that we were for twenty thousand years or so, the worse off we are.

Specifically, for the past thirty years or so, our Government has lied to us about food-which should not be surprising since they lie to us about everything else. They have taken the idea of food and turned it into the idea of nutrients, so that the author of In Defense of Food uses the term Nutrientism to describe the zealots in favor of this cause. Mainly the people who make hundreds of billions of dollars a year selling nutrients and not foods. This would be items like fake cheese, fake bread, and fake everything else you find on supermarket shelves. It was once marked as Imitation, but the Food Giants repealed that law and now the fake foods have all but replaced any real food you might find in a grocery store today.

This is scary stuff and I believe every word of it. But In Defense of Food is not all bad news-you can change your evil ways and start to eat better-and thereby reverse the evils of the Western Diet-in as little as a matter of weeks. Clearly the people selling fake food and the people selling pills to cure the ills of eating fake food, don't want you to do this. They want you to keep eating fake food and keep popping pills for the rest of your life. But you don't have to.

But as with all such ideologies, it is easy to say, but not so easy to do. Michael Pollan's' advice is simple enough-Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients listed on the package, better yet, don't anything packaged. Eat grass finished beef, if you have to eat beef. Eat organic, if it's local and you can trust the people telling you it's organic. Eat a lot more leafy vegetables. As with all healthful diets/lifestyles it is easier to follow his advice if you happen to be rich. Real foods cost a lot more than the fake foods that fill the supermarket shelves.

This is a thought provoking book which makes you stop and wonder what the hell did I just eat?

Dinosaurs are a pretty recent phenomenon-people only started to study the Terrible Lizards about a hundred and fifty years ago. It's one of those things that makes you wonder. DaVinci was intrigued by fossils and was one of the first people to ask why seashells were hanging out on mountaintops. The locical explantion at the time was that this was evidecne of The Great Flood.

Once the idea of Devine Design was put to rest, the real science of Dinosuars and all the other odds and ends laying around in the fossil record took on new meanings. With the advent of Darwin's Natural Selection and the oft miligned Evolution there was a natural desire to find The Missing Link. Turns out there are rather a lot of missing links to find. One of the more interesting of these links was the spot between fish and land animals. It also seemed that this would be a relatively easy one to find. The fossil record has a spot with fish and no mammals, and then a spot with fish and land mammals, look in between the two.

A group of palentoligists did just that a few years ago and discovered an animal that is, to all appearances, half fish and half mammal. The story of that discovery is covered in the book Your Inner Fish. It is a story of innerconectedness and how everything that have every lived on Earth is related to everything else that ever lived on Earth.

If you are fan of the Creator theory, then this all works out fine, as everything is made from the same blueprint-someone still needed to draw those blueprints, right? If you are not a fan of the Creator idea, then all these small steps along the way prove that the design changed over millions of years and that we are what we are through those changes. We call that evolution.

These are big ideas, big thoughts. It wasn't until the 1800s that anyone seriously tried to answer some of these ages old questions. We still don't have all the answers, and may well never have all the answers. If a fish that looks like an alligator was a stunning development in evolution 285 millions years ago, why are there still alligators around today? We live in an age of built in obsolescence and the idea that there is room for everyone seems totally counter intuitive to the whole idea of survival of the fittest.

But it makes sense, a place for everything and everything in its place. Life on earth would really suck if people had to do the serious work of pollinating flowers and breaking down leaves into topsoil.

I like science books and occasionally dip my toe into the deep end with some Number theory, String theory or some other off the wall topic. But more often than not, these books are less enlightening and more baffling. Oh I can read most of the words well enough and even understand the occasional sentence, but the overall ideas being discussed often leave me lost.

Not so with Your Inner Fish. The topic is large and complex one, the history of the human body and life on planet Earth, but the topic is treated with a light touch. The large words balanced with small ones, the names of ancient animals balances with the idea that they look like a hamburger. Childish names for things are often used in place of polysyllabic ones. This is a nice change.

Your Inner Fish is still a pretty deep book, there is a ton of science in here and some of it gets hard to swallow even as it is being spoon fed. But it is dead fascinating stuff. Like all animals with arms have the same basic design and the stuff doing the work is pretty much the same in all embryos of all species that have arms and legs. There is something pretty amazing about the fact that we are so much like everything else on earth. We are just an animal-albeit one with a big honking brain.

This is fun stuff, really-kind of a cross between Nova and Beakman's World.

I liked Ironman the movie-this may have something to do with the fact that I have never been a big fan of Ironman the Comic. It's hard to go into a film of something you grew up loving and not find it wanting. Case in point, one of the trailers before Ironman started was for Ed Norton's The Incredible Hulk-I'm a huge fan of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Tv Series. For me the biggest problem with the last Hulk movie was that the CGI sucked-it looks like they are using the same CGI, or worse, for this one. Ironman, however, was born for CGI-as one of the things that CGI does bad is organics-like The Hulk, one of the things CGI does with photo realism is metal-like Ironman.

The story of Tony Stark, Merchant of Death is updated to fit in with the world of Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction. We know they have weapons of mass destruction because Tony Stark's company is manufacturing them. After being kidnapped and nearly dying-Tony Stark is tough as well as a genius-he has a change of heart and doesn't want to make things that blow up any more. This is a shock to his partner in war crimes played very well by a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges.

I knew that Robert Downy, Jr was going to star in Ironman-though I will always be tempted to call him Morton Downy Jr-I'm just of that age where Morton was a lot more famous than Robert. Tony Stark is a drunk and a womanizer, did Robert Downy even need to study the script?

I was shocked to see the old and mean Jeff Bridges, but happy as well, he was great. The second shock in the cast was Gwyneth Paltrow as the cute and perky Pepper Potts-as silly a name as any Stan Lee ever came up with. Stan the Man makes a cameo dressed as a Hugh Hefner look a like. Terrance Howard looks sort of familiar, but nothing spring to mind as to what I might have seen him in. He is good as the sort of straight man in Ironman.

There are several funny/touching moments between Tony Stark and his idiot savant robots. His lab and his house, as well as the Ironman suit, have intelligences of their own. The story is fun, as are the many test flights and weapons trails that don't go quite as planned. The effects are great and very seldom do you have that whole-wow, nice effect-feeling you get from all of Lucas's recent efforts. The trailer for the Indiana Jones films looks depressingly like the trailers for the last couple of Star Wars films-George Lucas will be so happy when the tech for digital actors is better and he doesn't have to waste time with anything real at all.

Ironman looks, sounds, and feels really good. As all those striking Writers kept telling us-Its All About The Story, Stupid.

"This Blue Dog came into my life, and changed everything. It just hit like a rocket ship, and just bang!, you know?" -George Rodrigue

George Rodrigue paints Blue Dogs, and rather a lot of them. Well, I guess really he just paints one blue dog several times. The Cajun Artist George Rodrigue has been painting this blue dog since around 1984-it's supposed to be a sort of werewolf, or at least, be inspire by a werewolf. George Rodrigue is one of many artists whose names I am familiar with from seeing them on CBS Sunday Morning.

The Meet the Blue Dog story was fun and informative, as most of the Sunday Morning Show's stories are. The New Orleans Museum of Art currently has a show titled Rodrigue's Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs, and Beyond Katrina-March 2 - June 8, 2008.

I have seen these images from time to time, the blue dog much more stylized and codified than it once was. It wears a look of both surprise and boredom and the bright colors never cease to surprise. I like the blue dog images, but I like George's other works as well-most of them a bit deeper and more tradional. The blue dog has taken on an Andy Warhol kind of life where it is not really art any more, but a product. Which is good for George Rodrigue's pocketbook as well as his place in the history books.

In my own small works, I have never been able to follow this path myself-I can't seem to make all my images look like variations on a theme. And that is why I will likely never be featured on CBS Sunday Morning. But I do like seeing the people that are.

When it comes to coffee I normally use a French Press-this is as close to an espresso as you can get without really working at it. Grind your own beans and whip up some milk if you want that whole cappuccino experience. But really, it's always been about the buzz you get from coffee for me.

Keurig makes a machine that I really like. Now, its not that I am totally lazy, just mostly lazy. I like the French Press and the coffee grinders, but there is a reason so many of them find their way to thrift stores-most people are lazy. So what makes the Kuerig coffee maker perfect for the lazy coffee connoisseur? You plop in a little coffee, or tea, capsule and press a button and viola, you have a cup of coffee in seconds. I mean-wow. The varieties come in such things as Cappuccino, Butter Toffee, and Jet Fuel and a nice assortment of teas.

I've always been one of those people that would buy an Amanti Golden Eagle Espresso Machine if I won the lotto-but this little gem might be the next best thing for me. Hmm, coffee-God's Beverage.

A couple of juiced up coffees that I like are Shock Coffee and JavaFit Coffee-both claim to be more than just a cup of Joe. I like them, but I am not sure that they are that much different from normal coffee.

But that Keurig Coffee Maker may just be the best home coffee machine in the world. The French Press still comes in a close second.

When I first saw a newspaper with one of the publicity stills for Madonna's new album Hard Candy my first thought was who is that old stripper? I thought it was another story about the return of burlesque and the old women who still dance in smoky clubs. But no, this old woman was Madonna. I know we can't help getting old, but why the hell would Madonna use these horrid photos of herself?

Well, maybe she was going for that whole old hag look.

The music sounds fine-just like Madonna. A typical bit of lyrics goes-give it to me now, no one's going to stop me. The 50 year old Madonna still wants to be a sex goddess. The modern hip-hop beats fit well with this desire. The last song I really liked by Madonna was the techno bit of business Ray of Light-which didn't really sound much like Madonna. And in fact, many of Madonna's recent songs have not sounded much like Madonna. Hard Candy is a kind of returning to her roots album.

Back in the day, when Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were the queens of pop/new wave music-a lot of people had their money on Cyndi Lauper. Cyndi Lauper has a blog, where she writes Dear Diary posts about the life of a popstar. I like Cyndi, but she never quite got the fame that Madonna so lives for.

Madonna's Hard Candy is just one more Madonna album-though clearly not for old timers like myself, it does still sound good. Maybe if I liked rap and hip-hop I would like a few of the tracks a bit more. Candy Shop does have a good beat. I can see it being used in a movie soundtrack at some point. Overall, I think its good-except for those damned weird photos.

Or the Rise and Fall of If You Write It.

My random thoughts blog about trendy things has lost its small amount of Pagerank, which was 3 until fairly recently, and is now 0. This is not a great tragedy, except for my small trickle of income from paid posts that wanted a blog with a Pagerank of at least 3. Of course, it is entirely possible that writing paid posts is what cost me the Pagerank in the first place. Kind of funny that.

Alexa has also lost interest in If You Write It, my high spot on Alexa, so far as I recall, was about 165,000-which is where it is at the moment. But the current stats show my blog dropping down to the 600,000s or so, which is about as low as my current stats have been for a very long time. It is possible I could write some whiz bang post and hit the front page of Digg or FARK and get the numbers back up where I want them to be, but it is extremely unlikely.

So what has happened to bring about this reversal of fortune for If You Write It? Well, as with all things, it is my own fault. I have been dividing my attention with a couple of new blogs and I really do only have so much creativity to go around. But really, I feel my writing is about the same as always. Maybe I could write better content, but I am not at all sure about that.

A number of events over the past year or so that have effected my Pagerank, Alexa score, and general traffic numbers. Two items which generated traffic and no longer generate traffic are Micheal Vick and the sci fi film Cloverfield. I wrote regular posts of these two topics, but I have not found anything to replace them on a regular basis. Could the absence of these two topics be the reason for my dropping numbers? Maybe.

Among the posts that continue to generate hits are posts about Team Name Generators, Vanessa Anne Hudgens, Post Secrets, and Altered States of Consciousness. I have surprisingly little else to say about these popular topics on If You Write It.

I recently made some cosmetic changes to If You Write It, changing the blog template and getting rid of Haloscan-and all the comments of the past year or so. Not that I had that many comments, If You Write It has never been a huge comment magnet. If I deleted your comments, sorry, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

These changes were made after the fall from grace with Google and Alexa anyway. So what does any of this mean anyway? Changing my comments got rid of a horde of numskulls that liked to comment on the post about Vanessa Anne Hudgens. My recent post about Brad's Deals and online coupons got a lot of hits. The vast bulk of my traffic still comes from Google, pagerank or no. I still find Google Trends a great way to get eyes on my blog.

These are just ways of keeping score, and my blog seems to be losing where it once seemed to be winning. But really, I am not so sure my Pagerank and Alexa rank matter. Except to my ego, of course.

PS-in the time it took me to write this post my Google Pagerank seems to have moved back up a bit and now is Pagerank 2.

This is an idea that is bound to be copied by every other sports team in the world. SexySoxgirls.com has a place to put photos of sexy women wearing Red Sox hats, Red Sox uniforms, and Red Sox t-shirts. The images are more cute than sexy, but there are a few woman who manage to show a bit of skin. Nudity isn't allowed-I wonder about body paint?

SexySOXgirls.com is being slammed pretty good this morning, seeing as it is on Google Trends and The Boston Herald. Ah the price of fame, SexySOXgirls.com is having trouble keeping up with the hits.

The photography of Sox fans on SexySOXgirls.com is not that great, the lighting and posing very much on the armature side. But I predict that there will be a few a more professional looking images if the buzz lasts very long. There are only three pages of SexySoxgirls at the moment.

SexySOXgirls.com has a contest to win tickets to Red Sox games. SexySOXgirls.com also has a Cafepress Shop where you can buy such things as t-shirts and thongs with a SexySOXgirls.com logo on them. The thong is Made in America, nice to know that SexySOXgirls.com supports the good old USA. It's all a bit silly, really.

SexySOXgirls.com is not affiliated with The Boston Red Sox or Major League Baseball-at least, not yet anyway.

"I think it’s really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way. Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought that was really cool. That’s what she wanted me to do, and you can’t say no to Annie." Miley Cyrus aka Disney's Hannah Montana

Annie Leibovitz is the most over rated photographer in the world since Richard Avedon died. Miley Cyrus is the most over rated fifteen year old in the world since Britney Spears. So there is a kind of strange force that brings the two of them together so Anne Leibovitz can take a topless photo of Miley Cyrus for Vanity Fair magazine.

It is being blown out of proportion, it's just a photo, and not a very good one. After all, the 15 year old Miley Cyrus could have lived in Eldorado, Texas with two or three kids by her fifty year old husband. The fact that Miley Cyrus is on her way to being a billionaire by the time she turn 18 years old is obscene enough in itself. Why should the poor little rich girl care if her fans don't want to see Miley Cyrus topless?

Anne Leibovitz has taken the cute and perky Hannah Montana and made her look like a beaten and abused victim of kidnappers. But then, I am an old school portrait photographer where the idea is to flatter the subject and make them look better than they do in real life, not worse. I like strong shadows and I love the old style Hollywood portrait photographers like George Hurrell. Anne Leibovitz and Richard Avedon started off doing some great stuff and then wandered off the beaten path. Which is fine, lots of people think they are both geniuses. I just don't happen to be one of them.

There have been a couple of other stories about Miley Cyrus over the past few months, one that said she was pregnant and one about how her Hannah Montana concerts gouged her fans and left many of them standing outside. The photo of Miley Cyrus laying in daddy Billy Ray Cyrus's lap seems more of a couple pose than a Daddy and Daughter pose.

As they say-any press is good press. The Superfical seems to think it's much ado about nothing, and so do I. Hollywood Grind is worried that Miley Cyrus is only 15 years old and already taking her clothes off for photos. Maybe she should some advice from Vanessa Anne Hudgens, or maybe she already did.

"I heard somebody ask the question, `How good do you feel about Adam's future?' I feel good enough to take some of the risk and do some of the things and invest some of everything we talked about to do it. I feel that good about it. If I didn't, we wouldn't be doing it."
Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones on Adam Pacman Jones

Terrell Owens has pretty much behaved himself in Dallas, with the except of a possible suicide attempt, T.O. has been pretty happy as a Dallas Cowboy. Tank Johnson hasn't been here long enough for anyone to know much about him. And now we are getting the infamous Adam 'Pacman' Jones.

Is there any doubt about where Micheal Vick will end up when he gets out of jail? Maybe the new Dallas Cowboy's Stadium will be ready by then.

Big Bill Parcels was often quoted as saying he didn't like the drama many players brought with them. The rest us call what these players bring with them baggage, but it amounts to the same thing-trouble. At least that seems to be the general opinion about one Pacman Jones. Now that Big Bill is gone-and all doubts that anyone other than Jerry 'I'm In Charge' Jones is running the show with him-we can see that Owner Jones will do anything, and we mean anything, to win.

If turning the Dallas Cowboys into the Oakland Raiders is the way to do it, then so be it. Jerry Jones has never been about the legacy or the traditions of the Dallas Cowboys anyway. Everyone old enough to remember knows that Jerry Jones first act as owner of the Dallas Cowboys was to fire living legend Tom Landry. And no, we will never forgive him for that. The fact that he followed this up by firing living legend Jimmy Johnson did not win him any points either. His long string of losers at the head coaching position has only reinforced our idea that Jerry Jones is all about making more millions and less about winning more Super Bowls.

So welcome to Dallas, Pacman Jones. Hope you can help the Dallas Cowboys win the Superbowl. But please, stay away from T.O. and Tank, Ok?

The GURU bike costs about 7 thousand dollars and is made with carbon fiber and all kinds of gee whiz, hi tech cycling components. But the fact that this particular road bike has ten speeds marks it as a bicycle for the masses, not a racer. Road bikes make for racing usually have 21 or more gears. Of course, most people looking for cycling equipment aren't looking for pro quality racing gear.

I was not a jock when I was in school, and didn't much like the kids that were. I was always a little too thin and wiry for 'real' sports-and not much of a team player. So the idea of cycling fitness had a bit of appeal for me. You can spend time alone, workout, and show the world you don't care what they think by wearing skin tight apparel cycling. You develop a bit of bravery wearing those cycling knickers.

Bike gear can be addictive, as with all hobbies your bike accessories can become more exotic and less useful as you go along. I had one of those cycling products that was meant to improve your energy conversion-it was a not quite round crankset. That one didn't really catch on. But I do love my cycling gloves, cycling shoes, cycling Jerseys and my cycling shorts. I don't take as much time to cycle as I used to, but once the warmer weather sets in and I have a day off, I like to cruise around for a few blocks and think about taking a long ride out into the country. I don't ride a lot any more, but I do think about it.

My own bike is old TREK 15 speed that is a pretty good machine. I can still hop on and let the old muscle memory spin me up to a nice cruising speed before my out of shape lungs protest that I need to stop. I also tend to feel a bit more fear on the desents than I used to and I am not really interested in going over thrity miles an hour. Also, a lot of the old country roads I used to ride have more traffic than they used to.

It's not just the riding that I miss, its the way you feel when you are off the bike. The small pride you take in silly things like low resting heart rates and being able to run up stairs without getting winded. Ok, I am also older and returning to my bike won't make me young again. But hey, I'm not that old.

LOST continues to be a griping and very interesting show. The plot lines continue to intrigue and baffle, the good buys and the bad guys continue to evolve, the time/space continuum continues to be in flux. LOST seems to be a universe unto itself, but the farther we dive into the life and times of Benjamin Linus, the more the show starts to look like Alais. I loved the first few seasons of Alias-but it seriously lost its way in the end. Alias's wrap up made even less sense than the silliness of rival super secret government spy cells fighting over ancient magical machines.

LOST has always been heading down that road itself, but once it stopped being the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 and became the Life and Times of Ben the Rat-well, it has lost something. We now have the major story line turned into a fight between two apparently superhuman beings with unlimited power and influence-who can't seem to be kill each other. Are Ben and Widmore the same person in slightly different time lines? As always, the great thing about LOST is that there are nothing but questions and never any answers.

The killing off of several major characters this season is both shocking and expected. After all, only six, or was it seven?, people get off the Island and return to the Real World. So either the others have to be left behind or they have to be killed before they can be rescued. It is also somewhat surprising that Ben can summon the smoke monster, which was more than a bit of a disappointment in itself. With a voice like Godzilla and that look of awe and wonder on John's face when he first saw it-we all expected, a CGI cloud? Ranks up there with Data telling the Borg to take a nap so the Enterprise can get away.

But I will keep watching, I think LOST is the best show on TV. The big twist this season was the flashforwards, which replaced the flashbacks as the major means of filling time while our heroes wander around in the jungle. If we trust the story, then we know that at least our little core group will survive more or less in tact. Unless, of course, there are time variations at play, in which case maybe Jack will die from a rupture appendix, even though we have seen him alive and not so well in the future.

As with Alais, it is pretty much impossible for the show to end in a way that will please everyone. Even if all the countless loose ends are somehow tied up-some us won't like the knots they used.

Henry VIII was not a nice fellow. Despite the fact that he wrote the song Greensleeves and seemed to be very found good food, he had this nasty habit of killing off people. In the second season of Showtime's The Tudors we are just getting into the full stride of Henry VIII. Here was a man who would destroy the Catholic Church in England, set himself up as God's right hand man, and kill a lot of people who didn't think this such a good idea along the way. There is still that main thrust in the story of Henry VIII's desire to shag anything that moves, have a son to wear his crown, and made The Church of England something slightly different from the Catholic Church. Lots of wanton nudity of very lovely people and lots of gnashing of teeth of he believers of the One True Faith.

After four episodes Henry VIII, looking a bit more roguish in his little beard, has taken a couple of new mistresses as Queen Anne doesn't want to endanger her unborn childs by having sex with the King. Anne is turning into a rather pathetic figure, she has always been the villian-as she seduced poor Henry and caused him to cast out the Catholics and Queen Catherine. We all know that Anne will not met a good end, but since she brought it all upon herself, it is a bit hard to feel too sorrow for her.

There is good news for The Tudors from Shwotime, who have said they want a 3rd season and have indicated that they want to follow the entire sage of the Six Wives of Hevry VIII. There is a bit of time compression going on already as we shift from one season to another and Anne gets pregant and gives birth in pratically the same episode. So I look forward to seeing how the rest of the story unfolds.

The addition of the great Peter O'Toole gives the show one more element of class in an already very classy production. As Pope he is a hard and angry man who is not above ordering someone's death if it suits his ends. But the Pope is powerless to do more than threaten Henery VIII with excumunication, something which is no threat to Henry once he has set up his own Church.

The storm clouds are gathering for Queen Anne and those who refuse to accept Henry as the Head of The Church. The smaller matters of family life are mentioned in passing, and the great sweeping events of History are falling into place. Damn, this is a good show.

My Boy Jack was a British ITV production that made its way to American TV via PBS's Masterpiece Theater. Daniel Radcliffe plays the part of Rudyard Kipling's son Jack. The cast is impressive and it is interesting to see Harry Potter looking a bit like Hitler wearing a uniform and a mustache.

World War I was a gruesome and bloody war in which the British battle plans involved marching as many soldiers as they could into German machine gun fire. Rudyard Kipling is so keen on this course of action that he is bound and determined to put his own son among the cannon fodder for King and Country.

My Boy Jack is a very good show, filled with sorrow and drama and what it means to be an Empire. Having never seen a war worth fighting myself, it is hard imagine this burning desire to go forth and give battle to the enemy. World War I and World War II had some real enemies, and the world would not be what it is if those wars had been lost. My Boy Jack explores what this blind patriotism means to the Kipling family.

It is simply baffling that these young men were being marched off to certain death and that they chose to go anyway. If you chose not to go, you were nothing but a coward and not worth talking to. If there were war protesters they would likely have been stoned. Between the War and the Spanish Flu, it's really surprising that there were any people left to fight in World War II.

My Boy Jack is a good movie.

To call Truman Capote's In Cold Blood a masterpiece would not be an understatement, but merely a matter of fact. It is the story of the murder of a well to do family from a small Kansas town by two villains-villains we are made to know and understand and have certain feelings of sympathy for. In Cold Blood might be called the first Non-fiction Novel, as it is told in the manner of a story with characters and there seems to be a plot rolling through the events that make them inevitable.

Even now, fifty years later, after the advent of drive-by shootings, school shootings, mass suicides, and the common place facts of murder we see on a daily basis-this story still has the power to effect the reader. It is because of the novel-like feel of the work. We come to know the Clutters, who are murdered for no reason whatsoever, and Dick and Perry, the murders who have no conscious. The fact that they are real people and not make believe only makes the story all the more horrible.

There is a tremendous amount of suspense built up over the course of the book. Even after we know that the Clutters are murdered, it still comes as a shock when, much later, the exact nature of the crime is explained in vivid detail. The normal shock that these were more or less normal men who did this, that stone cold killers are often more or less normal people.

The audio book has the perfect narrator in Scott Brick, as he has just the right drawl for the main characters who are from Kansas. He speaks slowly and gives each character a slightly different tone, he does a brilliant job. But I still have to say that it is the material in this audio book that makes In Cold Blood amazing.

Kansas City and Olathe, Kansas and many of other landmarks are mentioned in passing In Cold Blood. The people living their lives and then having to live with the horror of four people being murdered in their peaceful community. The details and the conversations make this an amazing book. Every angle of the story is covered. From the criminals themselves to the towns folks sitting around wondering who committed the crime. From the police who make the arrests to the friends and family of everyone even remotely connected to the murder of the Clutters.

At every step of the tale there is a new mystery, a new set of suspenses to ponder over. Who did it? Will they be caught? Will they get the death penalty? Will they actually be killed? The story is told with a lot of direct quotes and is also perfect example of Show, Don't Tell. Any event that be dramatized is. Where dry narrative could have given us the facts, Truman Capote gives of the heart and soul.

In Cold Blood is a great book.